photo by Stephen Johnson October, 01999

photos: [bristlecone | from top facing South | from top facing East ]

Ely, Nevada. 01999*. As the first step toward building a 10,000-year clock, The Long Now Foundation has purchased desert mountain land adjoining Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada.

Update: January 14th, 02003. Long Now is honored to have a new set of environmental advisors to help with any potential plans for the mountain: Paul Hawken, Gary Snyder, Randall Hayes, Spencer Beebe, John Reynolds, Peter Warshall, and Terry Tempest Williams.

Update: Nov, 02003. We have completed our onsite weather station project. You can see the year of data here.

"The idea of the Clock is to encourage long-term thinking, which is in short supply these days,"said Stewart Brand, president of the foundation. The monumental scale clock would be built inside spectacular white limestone cliffs at 10,000 feet elevation on the west side of the Snake mountain range. Most of the range is within the Great Basin National Park, which is America's newest national park, established in 01986.

The announcement of the land purchase was made at Baker, the gateway town of the national park, and in nearby Ely at a gathering of White Pine County officials sponsored by Ely's Economic Diversification Council and. The property was described as 180.3 acres, made up of eleven patented mining claims dating back to 01916.

Most of the two-mile-long swath of land is covered by a forest of ancient bristlecone pine trees. Bristlecones are considered the world's oldest living thing. One tree in the Snake Range was determined to be over 4,900 years old.

The purchase of the property from National Treasure Mines Inc. was made possible by donations from three high-tech pioneers---the Mitchel Kapor Foundation (Kapor founded Lotus), the Jay Walker family (Walker founded Priceline.com), and Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun Microsystems).

The Millennium Clock is being designed and built by Danny Hillis, designer of some of the world's fastest computers. Entirely mechanical rather than electronic, the Hillis clock design utilizes a new form of digital calculation and synchronizes with the noon sun to achieve reliable accuracy over very long periods of time.

As Hillis first described the Clock in 01993, "It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium." A working prototype of the Clock, eight feet high, is now operational and began to tick on New Years Eve 01999.

The Clock project is the core of an array of activities being undertaken by The Long Now Foundation to "foster long-term responsibility"---including a 10,000-year Library. A book by Brand, THE CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW (Basic Books, 01999), describes the projects and the philosophy behind them.

Other members of the Long Now board besides Hillis and Brand are Brian Eno (British musician and artist), Michael Keller (head of Libraries at Stanford University), Kevin Kelly (founding executive editor of WIRED magazine), Paul Saffo (director of Institute for the Future), Esther Dyson (editor and publisher of RELEASE 1.0), Roger Kennedy (director of the National Park Service 1993-97), Doug Carlston (co-founder of Broderbund Software), and Peter Schwartz (chairman of Global Business Network). Executive Director is Alexander Rose. The foundation is based in the San Francisco Presidio and can be found on the Internet at www.longnow.org.

"This is a timeless landscape," said Brand, describing the high desert terrain around the potential Clock site, "and the remarkable people here reflect that. That's the attraction. We have to be careful to protect that, just as Great Basin National Park does."

A number of individuals in White Pine County helped The Long Now Foundation find a promising mountain for the Clock. Realtor Dave Tilford engineered the land purchase. Karen Rajala, chair of the Economic Diversification Council, organized the meeting in Ely where the land purchase was made public.

* The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.